DropWizard Serving Assets help needed

Question

Help! I've been trying for hours, googling anything I could think of. I have a problem, that I would like to show my static content instead of my application on my site. I modified a simple hello-world application:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Class.forName("org.sqlite.JDBC");
    new HelloWorldApplication().run(args);
}

@Override
public String getName() {
    return "hello-world";
}

@Override
public void initialize(Bootstrap<HelloWorldConfiguration> bootstrap) {
    bootstrap.addBundle(new AssetsBundle("/assets/*", "/"));
}

@Override
public void run(HelloWorldConfiguration configuration, Environment environment) {
    final HelloWorldResource resource = new HelloWorldResource(
            configuration.getTemplate(),
            configuration.getDefaultName()
        );
    final AddResource addResource = new AddResource();
    final DeleteResource deleteResource = new DeleteResource();
    final TemplateHealthCheck healthCheck = new TemplateHealthCheck(configuration.getTemplate());
    environment.healthChecks().register("template", healthCheck);
    environment.jersey().register(resource);
    environment.jersey().register(addResource);
    environment.jersey().register(deleteResource);
}

Here's my hello-world.yml:

server:
  type: simple
  applicationContextPath: /application/hello-world

template: Hello, %s!
defaultName: Stranger

I applied everything, what the DropWizard docs (http://dropwizard.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/core.html#serving-assets) said. But I just cannot manage to reach the index.html

Answer 1

I have not seen an actual example that proves that the documented way actually works. And when looking in the Dropwizard source, I conclude that this is in fact not possible: the Jetty application context is set by the configuration parameter applicationContextPath in SimpleServerFactory:103:

environment.getApplicationContext().setContextPath(applicationContextPath);

And after that, the AssetBundles are registered into this applicationContext upon run() (AssetBundle:109):

environment.servlets().addServlet(assetsName, createServlet()).addMapping(uriPath + '*');

So, assetbundles are always served within the applicationContextPath that is set in the application's YAML file, so serving them outside this applicationContextPath is not possible (despite the docs saying so)

A better way to get this working, is to configure the application to use the / path:

applicationContextPath: /

And then, in your application's code, in the bootstrap() and run() methods, explicitly override the path for Jersey resources and add AssetBundles to your liking:

bootstrap.addBundle(new AssetsBundle("/static", "/"));

environment.jersey().setUrlPattern("/application/*");

Answer 2

I got it working by using the default constructor for the AssetsBundle() class.

With the default constructor your resources will gets looked up in a directory on the java classpath e.g.

/src/main/resources/assets/

and your have to name your applicationContextPath only /application

Point your browser to the folling location for static content

localhost:8080/application/assets/index.htm